GCHQ recruitment

[Jhokur]

Looks like GCHQ is looking for a few new recruits, and has created a very nondescript page for it: Can you crack it? - GCHQ

Thought it'd be interesting to see what our fellow spooks thought of it.
So far I'm pretty but there are sharper minds about.

[Nitrus]

How annoying that I can't even copy and paste the code.

My first impression is that the encoding is HEX-based.

[Jhokur]

I've copied it if it helps

Code:

eb 04 af c2 bf a3 81 ec   00 01 00 00 31 c9 88 0c
0c fe c1 75 f9 31 c0 ba   ef be ad de 02 04 0c 00
d0 c1 ca 08 8a 1c 0c 8a   3c 04 88 1c 04 88 0c 00
fe c1 75 e8 e9 5c 00 00   00 89 e3 81 c3 04 00 00
00 5c 58 3d 41 41 41 41   75 43 58 3d 42 42 42 42
75 3b 5a 89 d1 89 e6 89   df 29 cf f3 a4 89 de 89
d1 89 df 29 cf 31 c0 31   db 31 d2 fe c0 02 1c 06
8a 14 06 8a 34 1e 88 34   06 88 14 1e 00 f2 30 f6
8a 1c 16 8a 17 c0 da 88   17 47 49 75 de 31 db 89
d8 fe c0 cd 80 90 90 e8   9d ff ff ff 41 41 41 41

[Nitrus]

Thanks, I managed to get hold of it.

It's a set of assembly instructions that when disassembled, dictate a series of operations that allocate some memory and then write some data to the memory. The keyword is what is written, in order to decode this you would need to write some C/C++ code to fetch the memory address of the keyword and read it as a string for outputting to the console.

Then copy and paste the result into the form on the website.

[Jhokur]

I found a page which breaks down what the code does as well - turns out its a three step solution. Pretty slick. Being that I'm not into that level of coding it went over my head at first, but reading the "what it's doing" made sense.